I don’t believe that presidents should ever speculate out loud in public. I criticized it in Obama and it is no better in Trump. It serves no useful purpose and it provides those who are predisposed to jump on misstatements with ammunition.
It’s fine for me at a cocktail party or among family and friends. But not in public. And especially not if you’re the president. Even in jest.
After so many years it’s obvious to me that is just the way Trump is. He has to be the center of attention. And since he doesn’t prepare before these briefings, he ends up saying a lot of stupid, ignorant stuff and handing ammunition to the “fake news” that he derides so much.
I agree with you, but this is a “water is wet” situation IMO.
That’s been true of all presidents of recent memory and it may well have been true of all presidents. As Alice Roosevelt said of her father Teddy:
I agree with Dave’s premise regarding “musing out loud in public.†However, unlike Andy, I don’t see such rhetorical mistakes as a breach of character. IMO, these misfirings by Trump are part of a broader behavioral pattern, more in sync with having unfettered circuitry from his brain to his mouth, than simply being an attention-grabbing gimmick.
People who know the prez describe his nature as being curious, attentive, asking lots of questions during meetings, and I would add “thinking out of the box.†You put them all together and they create wonderful fodder for having a slew of unscripted remarks that can be instantly pilloried by his foes.
Oh, BTW, as gross as those off-the-cuff disinfectant remarks might have been, they do have slivers of unorthodox validity to them. UV lighting, used to eradicate bacteria and viruses, has been a concept around for a hundred years, and is even being explored in a current day research study. The same goes with the application of hydrogen peroxide, internally. Then you have Chris Cuomo’s wife’s neuropathic “doctor†recommending she put a little beach in her bath water to counter her own bout with Coronavirus – something she freely discussed on her personal blog.
I agree that a public figure like a president must take more care. It’s a deficiency of his and causes self inflicted damage. However, the notion from critics that he actually Proposed injecting Lysol or whatever makes those critics either the dumbest mfs in the world or just plain dishonest. Go over to OTB and you can witness it first hand.
“That’s been true of all presidents of recent memory”
Probably true of all upper level politicians in general, however this is a matter of degree and Trump is of the scale. Look at the Cuomo briefings. He is clearly the center of attention. But, when there is a question best answered by one of his aides, they answer and they dont have to start off every answer with a tribute to Cuomo and make multiple references during their answer to how great and awesome Cuomo is and the best leader ever.
Hydrogen peroxide. Using hydrogen peroxide “internally” mostly goes back to claims in the early 20th century that cancers didnt like oxygen so providing a lt of oxygen would kill the cancer. Their physiology was wrong, cancers grow in high oxygen environments, they are not anaerobic. So hydrogen peroxide causes lots of problems when ingested or injected (pulmonary and renal being important). We actually researched this when we decided to invent our own mask sterilizer and was one of the reasons we rejected the hydrogen peroxide method. We did not want to expose our staff to residuals.
UV light. There is lots of data on using UV to sterilize stuff but dosing is important. Not enough and it doesnt work. Too much and it is harmful, even to substances like mask material. When one of my guys was setting up our unit he accidentally had a very brief exposure. His face is still peeling. When we were researching this we didnt see anything on treating through the skin as Trump suggested and it largely doesnt make much sense. This virus doesnt live just under the skin. There have been two proposals of which I am aware looking at using UV “internally”. One proposed using UV through an endotracheal tube for pneumonia. It is 4 years old and hasn’t gone anywhere. How they they were going to get the light distributed throughout the entire lung was never clear to me and not many people thought this was going anywhere. There was another study that proposed using UV to sort of plasmapherese the blood. Besides being pretty expensive this would only remove pathogens from the blood, not from inside of cells.
Anyway, the problem here is that people like you have been trained to believe anything Trump says and not believe the experts. You truly believe that experts, my doctors and nurses, would rather have their pts die, and die themselves, rather than accept what he says as being the correct way to do things. Just os you know, this is not true. Take HCQ. A normal leader, a responsible leader, a good leader hearing that HCQ might work (OK a smart leader would look at the actual evidence too) would ask his medical leaders if HCQ was being looked at. They would have told him that yes, it was being used widely since we are desperate and willing to try stuff on the slimmest of hopes. His going on TV and pushing it was not helpful.
We really need good leadership. Instead we have a guy worried about his ratings and making his base happy. Someone who does not listen to or understand advice, just follows his own feelings.
Steve
I hope you’re not referring to me in that. You’re quoting me at the top of your response. I mostly ignore Trump and I think that his musings were dumb and unhelpful. I don’t blindly believe him.
I believe experts when they are within their narrow spheres of expertise and not musing themselves. Too much of what is being claimed to be scientific is the unscientific opinions of scientists. Any would be too much.
I was responding to jan who was trying to justify Trump’s mumblings about UV light and disinfectants. If w had not engaged in our UV project i would not have been aware of the history of hydrogen peroxide or the theoretical usages of UV light, which really have not been borne out. But, she will go to no end, bringing up bizarre examples to try to justify stupid stuff that he says.
On the topic of experts I think the biggest problem is that most of the people paraded as experts on TV really are not. Most are people with people with political points of view with interests or expertise in areas tangential to the area of interest. When someone actually is an expert and we are dealing with the unknown like we are now they can still be wrong but they have a better chance of being wrong, and most of the time the really good ones give a range of possibilities. Look at the Ferguson paper much maligned (and lied about) by conservatives. Read the da&n paper. He gave a range of possible deaths from about 6000 to 2.2 million. Conservatives choose one number so they “prove” that the expert was wrong.
Steve
Everybody has a political point of view. There is no expert so pure of heart that he or she does not have an agenda of her or his own.
My response to that is that I believe what they say within their own narrow area of expertise and ignore everything else.